Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6537066" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=6790260]EzekielRaiden[/MENTION] has given an answer from the in-fiction point of view.From the point of view of design, I think the reason is fairly simple: legacy. If you were starting the game from scratch, what would be the difference between an anti-paladin and a blade pact warlock? Or between an evil clerical cultists and a tome pact warlock? None! They occupy the same archetypical space.But D&D has a legacy of them being different things. (Much like its legacy of making the paladin something different from the heavily armed and armoured cleric, even though these also, archetypically, fill the same space.)It doesn't - there is no notion, in 1st ed AD&D, of "divine magic" as a power source or raw material. As per Gygax's DMG, all magic accesses power from other planes, primarily the Positive and Negative Material Planes. In 1st ed AD&D the Vancian flavour of daily spell casting is foregrounded to a much greater extent than in more recent editions. The difference between clerics and MUs, within the fiction, is explained in terms of how the spells are implanted in their brains. For MUs, the spell is implanted in the brain by studying a spell book. For a cleric, the spell is implanted in the brain by prayer: for 1st and 2nd level spells, dedicated prayer is enough on its own, but for higher level spells the cleric receives the spell from his/her god or some angelic or similar intermediary.Stepping outside the fiction into the real world of game design, their is an implicit understanding in AD&D that MUs cannot use healing spells, for balance reasons. Later campaign settings and 2nd ed AD&D supplements probably spelled out in-fiction rationalisations for this at great length (that's the sort of thing that 2nd ed AD&D supplements excelled at!). But within the core books of 1st ed AD&D this difference in spell capability does not have an in-fiction explanation.I don't know where [MENTION=6731904]SirAntoine[/MENTION] developed his ideas about all healing accessing the raw power of divine magic, but it has no basis in the AD&D 1st ed canon.</blockquote>

Verification